The little signs that Botswana's democracy is under stress as president Khama's autocratic streak grows

There’s a word in Setswana that people are now using to refer to Ian Khama. It’s “mong-wame”, which loosely translates to “my owner”, or “my lord”.

President Ian Khama of Botswana at the London Conference on The Illegal Wildlife Trade, 13 February 2014. (Photo/ Flickr/ UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office).

BOTSWANA has a reputation for being Africa’s democracy star performer. It has the
longest continuous multiparty democracy in Africa; elections have been held
every five years since independence - and the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has
won them all.

Botswana is regarded as a quiet, peaceful, clean,
non-controversial country – an arid sea of calm in a turbulent continent.

But
you can learn a lot about a country by watching the television news.
On the day
I arrived, I switched on the TV and there was a live news event on – President
Ian Khama was officially opening a stadium in Francistown, one of the country’s
main urban centres in the north.

There
was something utterly familiar about the fawning platitudes that speaker after
speaker ascribed to Lieutenant General President Seretse Khama Ian Khama – said
in full like that by those at the microphone – and his visionary leadership.

I
hate to say it, but that obvious sycophancy from the political class is
something most Africans can spot very easily, and I wasn’t expecting it in a country
that is looked up to as a model of democratic expression.

More
than that, the president’s portrait hangs in every public establishment – even at
the little Debonairs outlet at the mall, where the president’s face gets
steamed up from time to time as hot pizzas pass back and forth beneath him.

Nothing
sinister about that, you would say, but my Batswana friends tell me this is only a recent development in the country’s history, and hints to a creeping
authoritarianism in the political system.

“My owner”

There’s
a word in Setswana that people are now using to refer to Ian Khama. It’s
“mong-wame”, which loosely translates to “my owner”, or “my lord”. Granted, Khama is a traditional chief of the BamaNgwato people, one of the eight
principal chieftaincies of the Tswana people. But that word hasn’t been used to
describe a democratically elected president before.

These
otherwise benign expressions of “respect” take on a different form when seen in
the light of the ruling party’s dwindling support, and the country’s increasingly
fractious political climate.

Though
Khama secured re-election for a second term in the 2014 elections, the BDP lost
much core support, particularly in the urban areas. It garnered 32 of the 57
parliamentary seats, its smallest majority in its history. Opposition parties have made inroads since the formation in 2010 of a breakaway party, the
Botswana Movement for Democracy, part of an opposition coalition called the Umbrella
for Democratic Change (UDC).

Botswana’s
status as an idyllic hub of prosperity was threatened by the global financial
crisis of a few years ago, which led to a drop in diamond revenues, the
government’s main export revenue earner. It
led Khama’s government to halt planned investment and led to growing
unemployment; the country’s first public strike was held in 2011.

But
most of the change in the political mood can be ascribed to Khama’s own
temperament.

Son
of the country’s founding president Seretse Khama, under whose leadership the
country was able to harness diamond revenues for the greater welfare of the
people, Khama is famously arrogant and haughty, to the point of hubris.

A
graduate of Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he’s been described as
eager to impose “puritanical discipline” in party ranks, with an unveiled
disdain for journalists and media criticism.

So outrageous

Last year, Outsa
Mokone, editor of the Sunday Standard newspaper, was arrested and charged with
sedition, while a reporter fled the country saying he feared for his life.
According to the president, the paper published a story about him that was
inaccurate, defamatory and so outrageous that police decided “a crime had been
committed”.

A recent working paper from Afrobarometer showed that Botswana’s political regime is beginning to show signs of stress. According Afrobarometer’s data, risk of democratic instability doubled (rising from 12% to 24% of respondents’ attitudes between 2008 and 2014) in a context where official crackdowns on opposition parties and the mass media have left citizens beginning to feel that they are losing the “freedom to say what you think”.

On
the international stage, Khama has taken an inward-looking foreign policy that
has tended to isolate Botswana regionally. Khama has never attended an African Union meeting (nor a UN one), since he took office in 2008, saying they are a
waste of his time.

However, he also called for a rerun of Zimbabwe’s contested 2008 elections, a call that Harare
termed “extreme provocation and unstatesman-like”. Khama
denounced the SADC’s endorsement of Mugabe’s 2013 re-election, calling instead
for an independent audit of the poll.

And at a time when Africa has closed ranks
behind Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, Khama has continued to call for his arrest on
the strength of a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, most
recently in June when the strongman showed up on South Africa’s doorstep for an
AU meeting.

But my
Motswana friend said the perceptible shift in the political climate comes from
two places – Khama’s own personality as a military man obsessed with control,
and a constitution that gives sweeping executive powers to the president. Until
now, most presidents had used those powers for good, so there has really never
been a compelling reason to restrict the presidency’s executive authority.

Since
independence the government has pursued policies generally regarded as sound
and fiscally conservative. The state provides successfully for the health and
education needs of almost all its people, despite an arid climate and vast
distances between settlements.

Democratic tradition

Botswana
is the third richest African country in per capita terms, consistently ranks
top of most governance indices, and has a long unbroken democratic tradition. In
all likelihood, the government will continue to deliver on the “bread and
butter” everyday issues, and this authoritarian streak will just be a blip in the
country’s history.

But
history – most recently in North Africa – has shown us that psychological needs
are extremely important too, and people often put their physical welfare on the
line to fulfil these needs.

One
of the psychological needs that drives humans is autonomy – the need to feel
that you have executive authority over your own thoughts and actions.
Quasi-authoritarian regimes suppress, or at least chill, people’s autonomy, and the distress that
this causes must find resolution.

Sometimes,
it needn’t even be in the form of street protests and civil unrest, as happened in the Arab Spring nearly five years ago. In Africa, as political space
constricted – particularly in the 1970s and 80s – people found ‘refuge’ in the
church or mosque, neighbourhood watch committees, charity organisations, and
even school parent-teacher associations (PTAs) to feel like they have some
power over their own environment and destiny.

So
as Khama serves his second term – and conceivably becomes more cantankerous
as he grows older – it will not be a surprise if active membership on neighbourhood watches in Gaborone, spikes upward, for reasons that have nothing to do with crime.